Report Puts Focus on Huawei Role in U.K. Porn Filter

A BBC report is calling attention to a web filtering service in the United Kingdom designed by Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei, shining new light on concerns about just who decides what websites are censored in the country.

TalkTalk

A screenshot shows a promotional video for HomeSafe on the TalkTalk website.

The Thursday story focused on the fact that Huawei helped to design and continues to service a filtering system run by carrier TalkTalk Telecom Group PLC is raising eyebrows. Known as HomeSafe, the product allows consumers to select different types of content – such as gambling sites, pornography and social media – they would like to be filtered at certain times.

Huawei said that for the most part the decision about which sites should be blocked is automated and that changes to blacklists of websites come mainly from TalkTalk. But both Huawei and TalkTalk can make changes to the list of blocked sites, which happens when customers point out sites that should be added or taken off the list.

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The new focus on HomeSafe came after British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a speech earlier this week, praised TalkTalk for showing “great leadership” in pushing the country’s Internet users to consider filtering content. Though the product is commercial in nature, and only used when customers desire it, it has brought more attention to Huawei at a difficult time for the closely held Chinese company.

A Huawei spokesman said in a written statement: “The technology is an industry standard URL-categorising solution which gives telecoms operators control over the service they offer to their customers. The solution in turn gives their customers choice and control over of which categories of website can be accessed through their broadband service. The system is similar to other solutions in the market and is based on key word categorisation; URLs are added under instruction from the customer.”

In July, the U.K. government said it would conduct a probe into the Cyber Security Evaluation Center, a watchdog organization tasked to with monitoring Huawei’s participation in U.K. telecommunications infrastructure. According to a parliamentary report, the center is run and funded by Huawei itself.

It has been held up by the company as a model for other markets where there is concern about Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government.

The decision to investigate came after the U.K. parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in June that the country might have left itself vulnerable to potential cyberattacks and state-sponsored spying by allowing Huawei to play major roles in the telecom sector.

“A self-policing arrangement is highly unlikely either to provide, or to be seen to be providing, the required levels of security assurance,” the report said.

Huawei, which was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, describes itself as a private, employee-owned company and denies direct links to the Chinese government or military.

At the heart of HomeSafe is an automated software that categorizes content based on keyword searches and then shuffles it into different categories that can be filtered by users. For example, if a customer does not want their child’s computer to be able to access social media in the evening, they can select the option to block that type of content during that time range.

That software was designed by a joint-venture between Symantec Corp. and Huawei, though Huawei is now the sole owner of the joint-venture, according to the company.

On a wider scale, Huawei is only part of the equation. In recent months accusations from the U.S. about Chinese government-sponsored cyberattacks along with allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. cyberspying has changed the way people look at telecommunications. What was once an industry most frequently lambasted for excessive roaming charges now sits at the center of an increasingly heated debate about personal privacy and geopolitics – even when it’s only about who decides how to block children from checking out pornography.

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